


Cordite

by paperclipbitch



Category: V for Vendetta (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, no actual rape but a couple of references so possibly triggery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-09
Updated: 2013-03-09
Packaged: 2017-12-04 19:38:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/714325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Evey Hammond would not let herself become another of his exhibits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cordite

**Author's Note:**

> [originally posted on LJ February 2010] I love the graphic novel _so much_ (it’s actually one of the few books I brought to uni with me) but I find it so much easier to write for the movieverse. Ahem. Set sort of towards the end of the movie.

_You were clued-in  
You knew just how this thing would go  
A prognosis that was hopeless  
From the very first domino._  
– Aimee Mann

/

The first night, she dreams V rapes her. She wakes, eventually, shivering on the floor. Disorientated. She misses her cell, though she never thought she would, and reaches automatically for Valerie. But the final words of a woman long-lost are carefully laid flat beneath glass in the Shadow Gallery, and Evey Hammond would not let herself become another of his exhibits. Artefacts.

There’s a bed, hard and cold, stained sheets, all of it palatable now she’s had the _very worst_. And she knows why V did it, that in his own fucked-up, unique way, he was fixing her, giving her a present. There’s a possibility that he honestly believed he was doing her a favour, but Evey thinks she knows him well enough by now to understand what he did. She can never forgive, but she can comprehend.

The rape dream, V’s mask grinning in grotesque sadism, his leather hands ripping her legs apart, is a disservice to him. Even still shivering, Evey feels guilty.

/

There isn’t any need for friends now. She doesn’t see the point in trusting anyone, and there are so many things that she can never say that the thought of conversation with anyone makes her tongue ache.

She acquires her fake ID with a _lot_ of money from a nervous-looking young man, chewing Wrigley’s and with the party logo tattooed for six dark blue inches on his forearm. Evey stares at it with resignation rather than despair, and he catches her looking.

“It isn’t fool-proof,” he murmurs, “but they doubt fanatics less. Sometimes.”

His tone is grim, and he spits.

Evey contemplates killing him as she walks out his small basement, just to leave no evidence. She thinks V would do it, without hesitation.

She doesn’t.

/

Another nightmare, three in the morning, and her stomach is cramping because she’s forgotten how to eat.

_You got what you deserved_ a small voice snarls in the dark; it sounds like Lewis Prothero.

Evey ate Sutler’s ration for breakfast once. She tastes butter against her teeth, real butter, and stumbles to vomit into the sink.

/

She finds a flat in Tooting. Small, sparsely furnished, but she’s lived with nothing and so every inch seems like luxury. It’s her space, anyway, and she turns the carefully framed photograph of Sutler to the wall. She doesn’t destroy it entirely because she’s apathetic, not foolhardy.

There’s a job too, washing dishes in a restaurant for the affluent. They send back plates piled with lobster and caviar and asparagus and some nights Evey pictures V killing every last diner, the shining edges of his blades. But he had a plan, a string that Evey doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t want to just sit back and watch profiteers drown in their own blood.

V promised that the hate and anger would become something prettier. Purer. She’s still waiting.

/

If you know where to look, there’s still a trade. You can get anything you want, if it’s worth the risk. When her first payslips clears, Evey buys the collected works of Shakespeare. The cover is torn and the edges of the pages are curled and there’s what looks horribly like blood splashed over six pages of _King Lear_ , but it’s still _hers_ and she holds it like a lover for a whole night, not opening it, just cradling the book because it feels like magic.

It takes her an hour to realise that she’s crying. Deep, rippling sobs that rip her throat raw, blind her eyes, make her face numb.

The edges of the book leave marks on her crossed arms.

/

In the Shadow Gallery, in the days before Evey lost hope and escaped in her pink knickers and thick blush, V taught her to play monopoly. Silver figures skidding over the coloured board, little plastic houses appearing on the familiar names of _Fleet Street_ and _Mayfair_. Places she could never hope to own, except with the little bits of card and her hopeful imagination.

V won, the paper money passing easily between his gloved fingers. Evey sipped Earl Grey and tried to work out if the mask’s grin wasn’t just a little more _smug_ than usual.

She was a different little girl that time. And looking back, she honestly doesn’t understand how she could ever have been so naive.

/

Her copy of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ is burned onto a data disk from someone’s laptop and always pauses at thirty-six minutes and twelve seconds, before leaping awkwardly forward to the next scene. She doesn’t really mind; a lot of this is about compromise and it seems almost right that the only time she’s ever seen it perfect was with V.

Tuesday night, she lies under her bed with her hands over her ears while down the street the Fingermen kick a door down and drag two screaming men into the road. It’s a wet night, and Evey screws her eyes shut, reciting streams of dialogue in her head and trying not to picture damp gravel sticking to knees, bloodied noses and desperate begs for mercy. For a minute, the fear returns, thick and suffocating. 

Then, suddenly, V is with her. Oh, not _real_ V, who still stalks his underground palace, stroking gloved fingers across his paintings so they won’t grow lonely, but V nonetheless. His body weight crushes her to the floor, the black cape covering them both. Evey feels the cold plastic curves of the mask pressed against the almost-bare skin of her skull, the fibres of the wig skimming down over her cheeks. The black gloves hold her wrists down, and he lies over her, keeping her calm and quiet.

It’s too real, and it scares her in a different way.

/

Almost all of the news is made up of lies now. Evey dutifully watches for the snatches of truth, the momentary reprieves. She wonders if anybody believes any of this anymore. She could ask, of course, quiet and subtle, but if she thinks about it she doesn’t want the answer either way. Evey doesn’t want to be a part of anybody’s revolution, which is why she left V.

She tells herself it’s why she left V.

In a loose dream, early hours of Friday morning, Evey fabricates a conversation with him.  
“I don’t understand you.”

“We both know that isn’t true.” Matter of fact. Calm. The truth Evey struggles to suppress.

“All right,” she sighs, “I don’t _know_ you.”

She knows it’s a dream because the mask’s smile drops, turns to a grimace.

“And that will always be the problem, won’t it?”

Evey can’t reply, and wakes on the tip of a scream she barely remembers to swallow.

/

They have oranges at the market. They look weathered, but they’ve been imported and that’s exciting as far as Evey is concerned. No co-workers here today, though she isn’t so worried anymore; they all look through her as it is. She’s slid between the cracks of the world and she still isn’t entirely sure how she feels about that.

The first brushes of autumn are in the air, a bite in the wind. September hurrying in and she still has a choice to make.

She buys three oranges, though she doesn’t _really_ want them, gets them home and rips at the skin. The colour seems almost gaudy, cheap, desperate. But she eats them anyway, citrus sharp against her tongue.

/

The fairytale she entertains herself with when it’s cold and the Fingermen are breaking doors and bones is a twisted parody of romance, one that cheapens both her and V. V has plans and he would not abandon them, not for anyone, certainly not for her. Still, they could hide in the Shadow Gallery forever, waltzing to battered old tunes on the jukebox, eating stolen rations and studying books as holy writ. A love Evey could live with, she thinks, which is strange because it shouldn’t be enough. 

He would never remove his mask for her, she knows. And maybe she is becoming used to the idea of never seeing what is behind it. Perhaps she doesn’t even want to.

V asked her to return; she has no way of knowing if he’s even still alive. She would take an exercise in modesty, convince herself that V doesn’t even remember asking her to come back, but he remembers everything, she knows. Everything except perhaps what it is to be human, and even so, Evey thinks it might be best that way.

/

Her winter gloves are second-hand, black leather though she doesn’t realise the implications until she is sitting in her flat and looking at them. When she puts them on her hands are no longer her own, feminine fingers and the scar on her thumb from an accident with a kitchen knife when she was a child. They become V’s, and even brushing her forearm with one hand is enough to make her shiver.

Evey cannot think about this. She _cannot_.

That night, curtains closed, she sits beneath her window and listens to the wind skin the pavements. Booted feet on tarmac, but no screams; not yet. She shuts her eyes and tips her head back, and already she imagines the cool plastic lips of the mask pressing against her skin where she swallows. This is sick but she’s always been sick and she cannot turn back now; she does not know how to. She does not want to.

Thighs open, her gloved hand slips between them, and it is V’s fingers on her, V crouched on the floor against her. Evey bites her lower lip until it bleeds, V’s name spilling from her in a fierce whisper, as in the street below her the Fingermen stop a helpless prostitute up against a brick wall and no one does anything at all to stop it.

/

There will not be a happy ending; no one gets a happy ending. Valerie’s skin fell from her bones, Evey might live onwards but fuck knows what her future will hold – not very much, she suspects – and V will either emerge triumphant and then fade from sight or fail to be martyred in crimson on the evening news. She dreams of his blood, soaking her hands and skin and clothes and wakes to sweaty sheets and panic. Evey _cannot_ go back, not the man she loves who is barely a man at all but who is all of humanity crammed into a black cloak with all the cruelty that that implies, she cannot return and watch him die. Perhaps he is already dead, the video feeds silent, but either way Evey would rather not know for certain.

She sips at cheap sour tea and realises that she has no idea what she wants; at least, nothing attainable.

/

The box contains a mask and a hat and a cape, all taped up neatly inside. Evey lays them out on her bed, the ghost of V with none of the words or the thoughts or even the emotions behind it. She lays her cheek against the cool plastic of the mask, and smiles. 

She no longer knows if V is the villain of this piece or if labelling anyone as a _hero_ or a _villain_ is childish and unnecessary.

What Evey _does_ know is that she must go back. She no longer has any choice, though it cannot end well and if she survives she knows it will come at a painful cost.

/

Evey locks the door to her flat on the fourth of November and loosely wonders if she’ll ever come back; if she’ll miss it at all if she doesn’t. They’ll break the door down eventually, find her Shakespeare and her _Count of Monte Cristo_ and maybe the neighbours will be shocked and maybe they won’t and she closes her eyes, drawing on V for some kind of strength.

She remembers weeping in the rain on a rooftop and V with her as her body and soul fell apart and came back together different.

When she opens them, the world is a slightly different colour and Evey wonders why she has spent so long worrying about all of this. 

After all, as V would say, when you get right down to it, it’s nothing but vaudeville anyway.

/


End file.
